Monday, March 12, 2018

In last night's Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter I mentioned using the Internet Archive as a source of public domain video clips to re-use in classroom video projects. That suggestion drew a lot of emails from readers this morning. Most of the emails expressed concern about the content that students can find on the Internet Archive. I have concerns about it too which is why I recommend that you use the Internet Archive to find public domain video clips that you then put into a folder to share with your students. By doing that, your students don't have to go to the Internet Archive to find public domain video clips. This evening I recorded a short video to provide a bit more explanation and a demonstration.

Annotating images can be a good activity for students to do illustrate their understanding of a process by adding information to a blank flowchart. Annotating images is also a good way for students to highlight and identify parts of a diagram like one of a plant cell. I have had students annotate images to identify geological features in images of the Grand Canyon. Here are three tools that your students can use to annotate images online.

OneNote users can annotate images in the web, desktop, and mobile versions of OneNote. You can upload an image to a page in your notebook and then use the drawing and typing tools to write on top of the image. One of the neat things about the web and desktop versions of OneNote is that you can search the web for images right from your notebook. When using the mobile version of OneNote you can add images by importing them from your phone's camera roll or by taking a new picture with your phone's camera.

Google Keep users can annotate images on their mobile phones and or in the browser-based version of Google Keep. In the browser-based version of Google Keep you have to import images. In the mobile version of Google Keep you can import from your camera roll or take a new picture with your camera. Watch my video below to see how you can annotate images in the browser-based version of Google Keep.

Pixorize is a free tool for adding interactive annotations to your images. Pixorize will only work in the web browser on a laptop or desktop computer. Using Pixorize is a fairly straight-forward process. To get started just upload any picture that you have saved on your computer. Once the image is uploaded you can add points, circles, squares, and stars as annotation markers on your image. After adding an annotation marker you can write text to explain the element of the image to which you are calling attention. To save and or share your work on Pixorize you must create an account. However, creating an account didn't require validating your email address (I created an account with a fake email address that I have for one of my dogs). After saving your image on Pixorize you can share a link to it or embed it into a blog post

Timelinely makes it easy to get started. You just have to copy a YouTube URL into the Timelinely homepage to get started. Once you have entered the URL for a video, a new screen appears that allows you to add tags or annotations to the timeline of the video. You can do this while the video plays or you can simply jump to a place on the video to add annotations. Your annotations can include text or images. As you can see in the screenshot below, I included an image of my friend Tom Richey in the annotation that I made on one of his YouTube videos.

Before you get too involved with Timelinely it's important to note that you'll have to create an account in order to save and share your work. You can create an account by using your Google account, by using your Facebook account, or by signing up with any email address. You can share your annotated version of a video via email and social media. Embedding the annotated version is a feature that Timelinely says is coming soon.

Applications for Education
One of things that I like about Timelinely is the option to include pictures in your annotations. I can see that feature being used to include an alternate example for students to view when watching a math lesson.

I'm not sure that Timelinely is any better than a handful of similar services, but it is nice to have options

My refrigerator is quickly getting covered with the art my toddler makes with her Crayola crayons and construction paper. Looking at one of her boxes of crayons over the weekend I was reminded of Crayola's huge collection of lesson plans.

Crayola's lesson plan library contains 1766 free lesson plans. There are lesson plans for every grade from pre-K through 12th grade. As you might expect, the lesson plans incorporate one or more Crayola products, but you could probably substitute in similar products made by other companies. The lesson plans include step-by-step directions as well as a list of standards addressed by in the lesson.

All of the lesson plans on the Crayola site have an art component, but many cover topics in other areas. For example, this lesson plan on storytelling traditions is based upon a couple of brief history lessons. And this lesson plan for high school students focuses on using whiteboards and dry erase markers in group or individual problem solving. You can search and browse Crayola's lesson plan catalog according to grade level, subject area, and topic.